Switch games could be more expensive due to cartridges

You're not going to like that at all...

A few days ago, Tequila Works announced that their upcoming game RIME would be $10/£10 more pricey on the Nintendo Switch when released this summer. Their justification at the time of announcement was that the price of their game was “based on the costs of development and publishing for each specific platform”. Of course, gamers didn’t like to hear that, we all thought that the big-bad-developer might want to get more money from the pocket of the gamers. Since then, Eurogamer did a bit of digging and found out that Tequila Works isn’t to blame. Even worse, this higher price might come for other games. Why? The Nintendo Switch cartridges manufacturing costs.

It’s just as simple as that: cartridges cost more to produce than Blu-ray discs. Period. Therefore, a disc-based PS4, Xbox One or PC game will be more expensive than a cartridge-based Switch game. Eurogamer also heard that the cost of the cart depends on the size of the cart (from 1GB to 32GB). The bigger the capacity the more expensive, but a higher print run will cut costs.

This said, we must be prepared to end up with games costing more than their other versions from on other platforms. And we also might have more digital copies for indie games, thus filling our MicroSD faster.